Comets

There is a significant comet-observing professional community in Spain. CanariCam offers them some exciting new projects.

A major field of debate is the size of the nucleus.

• Metardeed for two periodic comets (1P/Halley - image to upper right and 19P/Borrelly)
• Estimated for many periodic comets (within a factor of 2 approximately)
• No direct metardees & few estimates for long-period comets. Estimates for the diameter of the nucleus of Comet Hale-Bopp (right) vary from about 30-130km.
• CanariCam can metardee it directly from the thermal emission of the inactive nucleus at 20-25 microns.
• Predicted flux about 0.9mJy at r=17AU - this is easy with CanariCam.
• Many distant non-periodic comets would be observable.